THIRTY-TWO BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION COLLECTOR S SET FEATURES
- 53 newly restored films from 41 editions of the Olympic Games, presented together for the first time
- Landmark 4K restorations of Olympia, Tokyo Olympiad, and Visions of Eight, among other titles
- New scores for the silent films, composed by Maud Nelissen, Donald Sosin, and Frido ter Beek
- A lavishly illustrated, 216-page hardcover book, featuring notes on the films by cinema historian Peter Cowie; a foreword by Thomas Bach, President of the International Olympic Committee; a short history of the restoration project by restoration producer Adrian Wood; and hundreds of photographs from a century of Olympic Games

Films included:

Stockholm 1912
The Games of the V Olympiad Stockholm, 1912 (dir. Adrian Wood)

Chamonix 1924
The Olympic Games Held at Chamonix in 1924 (dir. Jean de Rovera)

Paris 1924
The Olympic Games as They Were Practiced in Ancient Greece (dir. Jean de Rovera)
The Olympic Games in Paris 1924 (dir. Jean de Rovera)

While the price of this too rich for my blood, what I find mind blowing about this is Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia I and II, both landmarks in film making, are FINALLY getting the blu ray treatment! Not only that, but a 4K restoration! The good thing about Criterion, like many such "boutique" labels, they won't butcher the work for content they will release things in the most valid form possible. In fact, back when Leni was alive they even worked with her to release Olympia I and II on laserdisc (some have even suggested Disney should licence Song of the South to Criterion).

Other notable things in this set are blu ray releases for the Tokyo Olympiad (another breakthrough film making it's blu ray debut) and the 1936 Berlin Winter Olympics film.

Of course equally awesome is the restored silent era footage. Sadly they couldn't accurately reproduce the score of those (due to the fact that they are lost) so they had to improvise and make modern day scores, but the good thing about that if you don't like the fact that it's not original you can just mute sound completely (though I'm guessing there will be an option to turn the score on and off)

I must say that 4K scan is orgasmic! The same disc also includes the official Winter Olympics film of that year. Click the link to view screenshots from the blu ray!

You have the original German language track with English subs. My only gripe with it, would have been cool to have the English language track there as well (which would have been valid).

An excerpt of the DVD beaver write up showcasing how Criterion seems to have kept everything as originally made, and I quote

Olympia is one of the films from the Special Edition that is transferred in a 4K restoration. The title is in the Public Domain and hence many DVDs exist of the film - most truncated from their full-length, cropped, are either the French or English versions of the film and most do not have the tasteful nudity of the beginning of Riefenstahl's Opus, SEE HERE. The Shout! Factory / Timeless Media DVD from 2011 has a disc with Triumph of the Will and a second DVD with Olympia. Both parts run about 1/4 hour each shorter than the Criterion 1080P. The image quality of the SD is fraught with chroma and dramatically hindered by its puny resolution, damage, prevalent artifacts and weak, video-paced, source. It has no subtitle translation the German audio. It's vertically compressed in the 1.48:1 aspect ratio. It borders on being unwatchable. The 4K-restored Blu-ray image is magnificent, filled with grain, impressively layered contrast and degrees of sharpness that most would not have thought possible for this film after almost 80-years. Even saying the new 1080P image is a revelation seems an understatement. Capture samples are below - the rich visuals are hypnotic in-motion.